It’s 6:30pm and I have only consumed one apple and one americano. This has left me a little cranky and a tad irritable. Of course, the obvious solution is to eat something, but you know….
Actually, I’ve been forgetting to eat more and more often lately. So far my pants show no visible benefit to this new regime of coffee, carrots and utter forgetfulness.
In other (ravelry) related news (otherwise known as ‘how I spent my money’)
I am 3/4 of the way done with the Spiderweb Cardigan. I’m loving it, but I am hating my inability to put together an non-retarded seam. I made it in a light lime green. Weird? I don’t know, we’ll see.
I’m also working on my first of too many Pirate Hats. Since the pattern is in graph form it was too easy to convert to crochet after finding the right gauge and all. It whips up fairly easily, unless you aren’t paying attention and forget that it’s TWO decreases per iteration and then you have to rip out the top when you realize that it just doesn’t seem to be closing up properly. Oh well, after the first one things always get better.
I picked up fiberfill so I could recommence with the weird dinosaur/prehistoric animal project. I found a pattern that would work perfectly for either an ammonite or orthocerus depending on how you finish it. Someone needs to have a nerd baby.
After my work on the pirate hats I decided that I could probably handle Fair Isle/Shetland/Norwegian patterns. I bought some wool yarn and I am going to make a felted purse using a repeated Norwegian chart. I cannot start that until I finish off a few things first.
I also picked up the yarn to do this pattern. I’m not sure why I like it so much (besides the fact that the pattern is dead easy). Everyone else gives me very guarded responses when i ask their opinions. I’ll make it. If you later see a horrid big cowl sweater in a heather rose color at the Goodwill, you know what happened.
I need to go add arms to my cardigan and pull out a row of the pirate hat.
ps I wrote this post with my T key popped off. I hate when it does that.
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I’ve been so afraid to use knit patterns for crochet…is it easy? And if you don’t like that cowl sweater I’d be happy to take it off your hands…=)
How good are your algebra skills? You make a million gauge swatches until you find the best (not just closest in stitch count, but more like best feel and drape. if you force a gauge that is close to the gauge on the knit pattern it could end up being very stiff). You need to calculate your crochet:knit stitch widths (ie the pattern calls for 16 stitches in 4 inches and you are making 12 so you’ve got to calculate out approx 3/4 the number of stitches in each row). You do the same thing with number of rows. Crochet rows tend to be taller than knit rows so don’t think that it’s the same ratio as stitches.
after that you calculate all that, you then have to calculate your decreases or increases because you want them to fall in approximately the same places but you may decrease fewer times because a wider stitch means you get to a garment width faster with each decrease etc etc.
It’s actually not terribly hard, you can do a lot of the calculating as you go, just make sure you take accurate notes and be prepared to rip out a few rows here and there, but who hasn’t done that with a regular pattern anyway?
Of course things like hats and scarves are super easy to convert. Also, I use this method to resize sweaters for me as I am shorter and rounder than the average crochet garment supermodel!